


Shadows in Your Head

by Mohini



Series: Ghosts [4]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: AU - foster care, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Implied Past Abuse, M/M, Migraine, Sickfic, Vomiting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-22
Updated: 2018-08-22
Packaged: 2019-07-01 04:03:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,086
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15766212
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mohini/pseuds/Mohini
Summary: It's only pain. She's very good with pain.





	Shadows in Your Head

**Author's Note:**

> come find me on Tumblr @Mohini-Musing

She should be writing papers and cramming for midterm exams. She should be in class. She should be figuring out how to juggle those things and keep up with her internship hours. What she very definitely should not be doing is staring at the screen on her phone through eyes she can barely open while trying to decide if she’s close enough to death’s door to warrant asking for help. She scrolls until she finds his name, blinking away the fogginess she’s definitely not going to consider could possibly be tears. She doesn’t cry. Tears get you nothing but a backhand across the face or an order to get out of sight. This is nothing. She’s fine. The pain in her skull ratchets up to somewhere around atomic blast before her stomach joins in once more with empty, fiery nausea. She’s so exhausted it’s all she can do to stumble into the bathroom before she’s sick for what she thinks is probably the billionth time in the last few hours. When she makes it back to her rumpled bed she decides it’s time to call for reinforcements, even if those reinforcements are her former foster brother with no obligation to come help. The phone rings for what seems like an eternity before his voice is there. 

“Tasha? You better not be calling for a ride. I just found a parking spot in the close lot,” James says in lieu of a normal greeting.

“Don’t need a ride,” she whispers, her throat raw. The words scrape and bite on the way out, and she hears a murmured curse before he answers her properly.

“You sound like hell. What’s going on?”

“Migraine. Can you, I’m sorry, this was stupid. I’m fine. Just email me your notes, would you? I’m not going to make it to lecture.” There are too many words, and despite how much it hurts to speak, she’s rambling, trying to explain why she called, trying to ask for something even her self-protection at all costs wired brain will accept as reasonable. 

“I’ll come after class and check on you,” James is telling her, interrupting the flow of half whispered, half mumbled, all painful words. 

“You don’t have to,” she’s interrupted by a piercing stab of pain behind one eye. The whimper escapes from gritted teeth despite her best efforts. 

“Tasha?” his voice is worried. She doesn’t know why he sounds so concerned. It’s just pain, she can deal with pain. She’s exceptionally good at it. 

“Natasha!” he says, his voice sharp this time. 

The response is unbidden, shadows of childhood monsters that didn’t go away when the lights came on. “M’sorry. I’ll be quieter,” she murmurs. 

“Ooookay, I’m coming to check on you now.”

“You have class.” It’s a ridiculous thing to say. Obviously he knows he has class, but she says it anyway because why would he come to her when he has somewhere he should be?

“Go unlock the door for me.”

“M’gonna be sick,” she whimpers, and reaches with shaking hands for the emergency bowl she put on the side table earlier that morning, or maybe sometime overnight. The details are pretty hazy. 

She heaves up frothy bile and collapses in a heap on the bed when it’s over, phone forgotten on the covers until a voice is coming from it and she holds it up to her ear in confusion. 

“Tasha, I know you feel like shit,” Bucky says, “But campus security isn’t going to like it if I kick in the door. Come unlock it for me, sweetheart.”

“M’not your sweetheart,” she grumbles, but she rises on shaky legs and lurches into the common area of her pathetic apartment. She turns the lock with one hand planted on the wall for balance. Opening the door proves too much for her, and she sways with it. James grabs her before she can fall, pulling her into his chest with enough force that she can’t stop the gag that brings up a spurt of bright yellow bile. She can now add embarrassed beyond words to her running total for the day. 

“Shh, shh, you’re okay,” he’s telling her, a hand rubbing her back and dammit, that’s just not on. She’s not a little kid. She just puked on him, and he should be angry, not petting her like a cat and offering up reassurances. She’s about to tell him as much when her stomach is suddenly in her throat and clawing its way further up. She retches emptily a couple times before there is more bile burning up and out. There are bright white starbusts in her vision, and her head is almost certainly going to explode. Tears are flowing freely now and she can’t stop them. James half helps and half carries her through the little apartment and into the bathroom. He sits with her in his lap in front of the toilet, supporting her forehead with his palm as she clings to the rim of the thing and her body tries to turn itself inside out. 

When it winds down, she doesn’t object to his ministrations as he takes her to her room. He tells her he will be back and then there is a damp cloth swiping over too warm skin, washing away the rancid strings of sick clinging to her chin. A cup is held to her lips, and she swallows a little of the water, grimacing when it hits her stomach like red hot embers. She hears him rummaging in the bathroom cabinet and then there’s a bitter tablet dissolving in her mouth. She can only hope this time it will work. Barely a few minutes pass before she’s bringing it back up. Time passes in vague patches of awareness, mostly of cool water on her lips and tongue, of fiery contractions of her stomach to propel the water up and out each time. She’s shaking, and every movement makes the throbbing behind her eyes exponentially worse. 

He rolls her onto her stomach, positioning her arms at her sides like a parody of a crime scene chalk outline, places something freezing cold at the back of her neck. He says it should help. Maybe it would, if only she could breathe without her head throbbing

She hears him speaking to someone, saying something about needing a car, fluids, meds, and then he’s talking to a different someone, there are numbers and times and she closes her eyes to sleep. 

Waking is hard, and the extra person in the room doesn’t make it easier. James tells her this is Steve, and she vaguely remembers him telling her at some point about a boyfriend he lives with, but she can’t work out how this person came to be in her room. 

“She really is out of it,” an unfamiliar voice comments.

“Just help me get her to student health. She needs something to break this and some fluids. She can’t hold anything down long enough for her rescue stuff to stand a chance.”

“Sounds like you’ve been here before,” the Steve person is saying.

“She’s like a cat. Hides and pretends everything is fine until she’s practically dying,” James is saying. She’d argue, but that takes energy she doesn’t have. Instead, she bats weakly at his arm and scowls. 

“Tasha, sweetheart, you’re a very scary little demon, very dangerous, yadda, yadda, yadda. But right now you’re seriously dehydrated and you’re not holding anything down more than a few minutes.”

She nods and regrets the movement immediately. She’d probably agree to a lobotomy at this point if it would make it possible to breathe without her brain throbbing.

“Hurts,” she admits, and she can’t muster up even the slightest shame at the relief of the Steve person picking her up and carrying her out of the apartment. She dozes in James’ lap in the car, waking only to gag into a plastic bag held open beneath her stretched wide mouth. When the car stops, they don’t leave it until something comes clattering up to the side and James loads her into a wheelchair so wide she could probably curl up in it and sleep. Instead she sits with her knees drawn to her chest and her cheek pressed against them. 

She’s only vaguely present as James gets her checked in. She thinks James made an appointment at some point during the time she spent dozing and heaving up the water he was so intent on her drinking. She must look as great as she feels because they’re in a room almost immediately. James picks her up and puts her on the little bed in the room, sitting on the edge of it when she grabs for his hand and holds on as tight as she can. A nurse, she thinks, tells her that her boyfriend should step out so she can be examined. She signs the signature pad with shaking fingers, signs a paper that says James can have her information. The nurse doesn’t try again to separate her from him when she cries tearlessly after another bout of empty retching. He tells the next person who enters the room that he’s her brother. The way she clings to him on the narrow bed like a toddler means the half truth isn’t questioned. 

Her blood pressure is low, her heart rate erratic, and her capillary refill utter shit. None of that seems to be news to James, so she nods and holds out her arm when the PA tells her she needs an IV to get some fluids and medication into her. James requests something called a J-Tip to be used before the IV is placed. Then he asks if they can give her something for the nausea. A device is pressed to her arm, a pop like an opening soda bottle, and then a spreading numbness. She can’t bring herself to be curious enough to ask what exactly that strangeness was. Then there is cool fluid running into the vein; something burns for just a moment as a dose of zofran is pushed in as well. There’s something else as well, one of the endless list of triptans to break the migraines when they won’t ease on their own. It takes only a short while for sleepy heaviness to pull her eyes closed, and she wakes to someone wrapping a blood pressure cuff around her bicep. Somewhere in there, a second bag of fluids is hung and pushed into her body by the whirring pump by the bed. 

There is some talk of moving her to the emergency room for admission and she forces herself awake long enough the vehemently refuse the suggestion. They settle on her staying in the clinic observation ward for a bit to see if the zofran keeps the incessant vomiting at bay and to be sure that her blood pressure is stabilized. James requests specific medications be sent to the on-site pharmacy, including some kind of auto-injector of the useless med she can never seem to keep down in pill form. He taps away at his phone for a moment before telling her that Steve will go get them so everything is ready before they leave. 

Tasha dozes until there is a cool hand on her arm, removing the tape that holds the IV in place. She blinks up with startled eyes. “It’s okay,” James tells her from some location just beyond the cool handed nurse. “We’re going to go home now and you can sleep there, Tash.”

She nods, does her best to help as he guides her into a wheelchair for the trek back to the car, and rests her head against his chest once he joins her in the back of the Civic. He says something about taking her to theirs rather than her place, and she nods her agreement. She doesn’t think she’s ever going to be able to ask for help without at least a little panic beforehand, but she’s glad to know that with James back in her life there is someone to ask who won’t tell her to shut up and put up.

“Shhh, Tasha, I don’t think you meant to say that out loud,” James chides her, and she shrugs. It doesn’t matter anymore. There’s a ghost of the migraine still lingering in her brain, but mostly she’s very tired and very glad for her mostly brother.

“Truth,” she grumbles, breathing in the now very familiar and immensely comforting scent that she files away as _safe _.__


End file.
